Meditations in Color

On Color

Meditations in Color began with a studio question: how do artists actually work with color when you look across a body of work rather than a few familiar images?

Above all, I wanted it to become a place to come and meditate in color. In the absence of a coherent collection that lets you sit with an artist's chromatic life in one field of attention, I began building the place I wanted for myself and for friends and acquaintances who had long wished for it too: somewhere to take in Matisse's colors across his works, or Bonnard's, or Morandi's, as fully as possible in one place.

What interests me is not color symbolism alone, but color in use: how it holds form, creates rhythm, establishes pressure, sets distance, and continues to operate even as subject matter, medium, and composition change around it. I return to artworks for instruction and companionship, but also to understand how color behaves once attention stays with the surface itself.

This is what anchors the project. It treats color not as an accessory to form, but as one of the ways form is made.

On The Archive

The project takes the form of a digital archive and research platform spanning artists from the fifteenth century to the present. For each artist, I try to gather as much of the work as possible into one place, then build pages organized by palette, chromatic relationship, tonal range, and atmosphere.

The archive is not meant as an encyclopedia alone. It is meant as a place of looking. The point is to make artists legible through chromatic behavior: what recurs, what widens or narrows over time, what tones seem to structure an entire practice, and what colors keep returning as habits of seeing and making.

The platform is also a resource. Artists, designers, students, and general audiences can compare palettes across whole bodies of work, copy them directly for inspiration, and carry those lessons into their own practice.

On Structure and Generation

My own practice runs alongside the archive, and it is built on duality. Each study sets an ordered system, a rule or a geometry, against the chance, deviation, and feeling that resist it, and holds the two in tension. The work begins in hand-drawn geometry and moves into algorithmic structure, with color present from the start as one of its materials rather than something added once the structure is settled.

When a palette drawn from a painting is set inside that system, the question becomes what survives the move and what turns into something new. Sometimes proportion carries; in other studies it is contrast, recurrence, balance, or pause. The point is not imitation but inquiry.

The Drawing System lets visitors work with those palettes directly. It offers artist-derived palettes as chromatic interpretations inside my algorithmic structures, while also leaving room for people to adapt palettes for their own experiments and, over time, build palettes of their own. In the longer term, I hope the framework can also become a scaffold through which other artists contribute their own studies to the platform.

It is both a surrender and a study. A surrender to the beauty and instability of color, and a study of how it survives transformation through structure and variation.

What I am ultimately working toward is a living record of how color has been used: one that can hold patterns across centuries, changes in available pigments and materials, and shifts in how visual culture organizes color over time. The archive and the Drawing System are two parts of that same longer work.